Months ago someone had posted here with some evidence that the mixing of the a mixing service was inadequate to mask transactions but nobody seemed to take it seriously.

It's weird how many users on this forum were ready to overlook on-chain evidence while the platform in question was pumping thousands of USD every week in advertising directly towards forum users at the time. Now that there's some credible accusations of fraud it's hard to ignore these older accusations.

Admittedly I've never made any transactions that I would feel need mixing... But not to tout any supposed ethics from my side, it's very likely that if I knew of a mixer's mixing being bad while I was getting paid a substantial salary by them to make some forum posts, I'd likely also avoid contributing to their downfall. But maybe also if we apply hanlon's razor here (Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity), since most people probably don't care or don't need to use mixing, they probably wouldn't bother to check either.

But this begs the question, if such basic blockchain forensics had exposed this mixer months ago, how did they stay operational till now?
Are the majority of people who transact with bitcoin, even users of this forum, completely unable to do even the most basic blockchain forensic research? Because according to the post I linked, it was really obvious to pick up the trail of the lackluster mixing going on.

The real cost of mixin'

One has to also consider, at what cost are mixing services operating? Many of them end up having their Admins arrested with unknown fates in international trials and jails. Others end up exit scamming. And would they do so if they were making profits in the first place? Thinking about it, is there ANY fee that would make it worth it to give out bitcoins in exchange for potentially tainted coins that are possibly connected to crime and fraud? Especially given how easy BTC transactions are to track? Based on the above knowledge, many suspicions can be raised. What motivation would someone have to provide a mixing service if he was to risk life in jail or even running it at a loss?

Credible suspicion against mixers

Could mixers be honeypots? It's not an unlikely possibility that mixers are created and operated by state agencies as a way to catch high-profile criminals that are under the impression of "masking" their transactions. But in fact these services could be used as evidence later.

Another really suspicious event that happened only around a month prior to the aforementioned mixer's demise is the revelation that the infamous Lazarus hacker group appears to have been using the mixer's coins for their own benefit. This revelation gives some credence to theories that mixer services might not just be government honeypots, but rather hacker honeypots. Where hackers gather a bunch of coins that definitely must be cleaner than their ill-gotten fraudulent coins, attracting users under the illusion of "mixing" only to hand out their very tainted coins to regular users in exchange for coins they can easily deposit into exchanges without issues. And after they're done exchanging everything, they can just start using the service for exit scamming to gain even more money.